Abstract

In the area of wireless sensor networks, mobile computing systems and other battery-driven computing platforms it is an important task to reduce the system’s power consumption, as the usability of such a system is tightly coupled to the duration of a battery cycle. A basic task for reducing energy consumption is the creation of hardware and software energy models to find and understand existing power saving potentials. This often requires a most accurate measurement of both the energy and the timing behavior of such a system. In this chapter we will show that, especially for sub-milliampere applications such as sensor network nodes, commonly used power measurement techniques do not perform well. We introduce MIMOSA, a low-cost measurement device that uses a fast voltage regulator and analog integration circuits to overcome most of the issues existing in other approaches.